When I was fifteen I got diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. It wasn’t a slow onset — it hit me like a hard punch in the throat. I’d been at a party, everyone was drinking, smoking and talking crap, when all of a sudden I thought I was having a heart attack. It was a bizarre sensation: a plague of locusts had been let loose inside my chest and I felt the urgent desire to run away. I went white as a sheet, began to tremble, and some of my friends began to crowd around, asking me what was wrong.

This made everything Order Xanax Online worse. I wanted these people to get as far the hell away as humanly possible. It’s like they were tearing out my entrails with their teeth. I suspected they weren’t even human, just empty shells programmed to Buy Xanax Online drive me insane, and then I began to freak out thinking I was schizophrenic for having such suspicions.

For a whole week I was sick. I lay in the bath trying to calm down shaking like an epileptic. My mum thought I was showing the first signs of some degenerative disorder. When I eventually went to the doctor, the friendly old bird put it how it was: “You’ve got a panic disorder. You need to take medication, get counseling, and read these pamphlets.”

So I did all three and I learned to live with a vaguely tolerable level of anxiety, that pretty much ruined my ambitions, but allowed me to stay sane, for about the first ten years of my adult life. Dealing with the anxiety was a self-perpetuating run of bad habits: porn use, alcohol, drugs and constant evasive measures. I’d either socialize too hard to avoid the hell of my own head or isolate completely for fear of being seen as the slavering, nervous wreck I’d sometimes become.